Art: Andrade gave soul to Op Art

The Optical Art movement - Op Art for short - didn't last more than a few years during the 1960s, and involved a relative handful of painters. Edna Andrade, who carried the Op banner in Philadelphia, lasted much longer, three months into her 92d year.

Highly respected as a painter and esteemed as a generous colleague and teacher, Andrade died at home on April 17. She hadn't created an Op painting in years, but she'll be remembered for the distinctive dimension she contributed to the genre.

Op Art feeds on spatial illusion by exploiting geometric patterns to fool, dazzle or confuse the eye. Op is as much physiological phenomenon as purely aesthetic inquiry, and its effects can be harsh. In the paintings of Op's most prominent artists, such as Victor Vasarely and Bridget Riley, they often are.

One Andrade painting owned by the Philadelphia Museum of Art,

Color Motion 4-64,

typifies the way Op bends and flexes geometry. It's a distorted checkerboard sectioned into four quarters, in which the edges seem to curve backward. The painting is rigorously rectilinear, as much Op is, like a crystal lattice seen under an electron microscope.

Andrade, who added the techniques of architectural drafting to the realist foundation she acquired in art school, was admirably equipped to realize such visual permutations. Yet as we see in paintings that she made after Op's heyday, such as

Night Sea

(1977) and

Mariposa

(1983), she pushed geometry beyond the somewhat rigid formalities of regular grids, lattices and starbursts.

Her subsequent explorations of geometric predictability were modulated by soft, confectionary color

(Mariposa)

and pulsating rhythm

(Night Sea)

. She humanized and transformed Op by emphasizing the poetic aspect of mathematically based natural phenomena. By illuminating nature's sublime qualities, she gave the otherwise austere Op Art a soul.

As a result, her geometric paintings, especially the later ones, have far more depth, allure and staying power than the purely phenomenological efforts of Vasarely, who is considered the inventor of Op. No other painter with whom I'm familiar has more effectively revealed the sublime harmonies of the Euclidean universe.

Andrade, who had lived in Philadelphia since 1946, exhibited regularly at Locks Gallery for nearly 40 years. In 1993-94, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where she studied, mounted a retrospective. Five years ago, the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania surveyed the Op paintings she made between 1963 and 1986. Yet the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which owns four paintings and 21 prints and drawings, is conspicuously absent from her show record.

It's ironic that the Art Museum, currently featuring two other female artists close to Andrade's generation, Frida Kahlo and photographer Lee Miller, didn't celebrate Andrade's career before she died. It's doubly ironic given that over the last several months two other female painters, Cecilia Beaux and Elsie Driggs, also enjoyed special-exhibition attention, at the Pennsylvania Academy and the James A. Michener Art Museum, respectively.

How often have Delaware Valley museums featured four important female artists more or less simultaneously? I only wish Andrade could have been one of them.

(The Beaux and Driggs retrospectives have closed. The Miller show closes today; Kahlo runs through May 18.)

Andrade's death reminds us again, as if we needed it, that artistic achievement isn't always rewarded while the artist is alive. This is especially true for women of Andrade's generation, whose careers peaked before feminist consciousness forced the art world to pay closer attention to what they were doing.

Andrade did crack several major museum collections, including the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Baltimore Museum of Art; and the Dallas Art Museum. She was also prominent in a show called "Optic Nerve" at the Columbus (Ohio) Museum of Art last year.

A comment that Andrade made last year to Inquirer reporter Amy Rosenberg strongly suggests that she understood how fickle the art world is, and that consequently she focused on following her aesthetic interests rather than the dictates of careerism.

She didn't regret not moving to New York during the Op ascendancy to try to crack the top tier, she told Rosenberg. Had she done so, she said, "I would have wound up an old waitress, not an old artist." That would have been a significant loss for us all.

A memorial service will be held in June, on a date to be determined, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Masters of deceit.

Illusionism in painting is a game that goes back centuries. Before Op Art, the most visible example in America was a more literal kind of fool-the-eye trickery called

trompe l'oeil.

The Philadelphia region was a fertile breeding ground for this kind of realism, which was as much a performance as an aesthetic statement.

The two most prominent

trompe l'oeil

specialists had Philadelphia connections. Irish native William Michael Harnett grew up here and studied at the Pennsylvania Academy. John Frederick Peto, whose paintings were sometimes mistaken for Harnett's - or deliberately misattributed as Harnetts - also attended the Academy and settled in Island Heights, N.J., next to Toms River. George Cope lived in West Chester and Jefferson David Chalfant in Wilmington.

Thanks in part to a recent bequest from the estate of Donald and Jean Stralem, the academy owns a significant and representative collection of

trompe l'oeil

pictures, sometimes called "deceptions" in the 19th century. The Stralems, who collected in this area, gave 14 works. Seven of these are included in a one-gallery installation at the academy called "Harnett, Peto and Their Accomplices."

The show provides a reasonably comprehensive introduction to this curious genre - curious, because

trompe l'oeil,

like Op, is essentially skin-deep. Reproductions of currency and the so-called rack pictures in particular, in which faux photographs, envelopes and the like are tucked behind faux cloth tapes, are designed to showcase the artist's skill at mimicry.

Trompe l'oeil,

like Op, required an unusually steady hand and the ability to reproduce precisely mundane details of typography and handwriting, but the paintings usually didn't go deeper. One exception is Peto's rack picture

Toms River Yacht Club,

which can be read as a symbolic portrait of club commodore J.H. Stoutenburgh.

Peto is well-represented with four works, including the magisterial

The Fish House Door,

which is more a conventional still life than visual sleight-of-hand. Harnett is represented by two pictures, one a Dutch-like floral still life.

Another point of interest is the inclusion of several relatively obscure

trompe l'oeil

specialists such as Andrew John Henry Way, John J. Eyers, and John Wilde. Wilde is noteworthy because his painting dates from 1957, making it an anomaly among these evocations of Victorian taste.

"Harnett, Peto and Their Accomplices" continues at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Broad and Cherry Streets, through Aug. 31. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays and 11 to 5 Sundays. Admission is $7 general, $6 for seniors and students with ID and $5 for visitors 5 to 18. Information 215-972-7600 or

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